Arts

Auntie on Big Brother: Memories of Nineteen Eighty-Four

RADIO

Several ironies surrounded the unveiling of Martin Jennings’ eight-foot-high statue of George Orwell outside New Broadcasting House in London this week. The first is the deeply equivocal view that Orwell held of his two-and-a-bit-year stint in the corporation’s employ (1941-43), where he judged the atmosphere “halfway between a girls’ school and a lunatic asylum”. Another is that no record of the vocal style he brought to his broadcasts on the BBC’s Eastern Service survives.